Space Needle: The tower to touch the sky

March 2020 · 4 min read · Seattle

If you live in Seattle you´re convinced to be at home in the best city in the world. It always rains here, but the coffee is quiet good and the people too. You have a modern town, you have great salaries, you have the ocean and you have a landscape around thats worth to enjoy. On the other hand, if you´re coming as a tourist you will discover an emerald city, located between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, about 155 km south of the Canadian border, but as green as its surroundings - which has earned the city the nickname "Emerald City".

Like a wallpaper: concrete and glass all around

Grunge music came from Seattle, and major Internet companies too. Nirvanas Kurt Cobain shot himself here, the Seattle SuperSonics, the Seattle Seahawks and the Seattle Mariners play here, "Sleepless in Seattle" with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks plays here, and Jimi Hendrix's hometown also has a pop museum.

The city with the Pike Place Market, the ferry pier, the futuristic monorail and the big Ferris wheel on the water looks clean and tidy, the people are friendly and they are in love with the weather. "If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes", they say.

Seattle has been voted the "most livable city" in the U.S. several times, and anyone who comes here must definitely visit the Space Needle, Seattle's landmark and remnant of the 1962 World Expo. Behind a professional security checkpoint, an elevator waits to take you up to 184 meters high in just a few seconds. Caution for those who are afraid of heights: The elevator is glassed-in, so you look down as you go up. A queasy feeling.

It doesn't let up either, in the round platform that offers a 360-degree view of the whole city and even has a rotating glass floor from which you look down over your own feet to the small, small humans don there on the streets. This is nothing good for people with a fear of heights.

Below you see the monorail train takes people to the Museum of Pop Culture, the sun sticks to the horizon and you can see the Olympic Mountains and the Sky View Observatory, which is much higher than the Space Needle, but not as beautiful. https://www.skyviewobservatory.com/

The Space Needle is unique. The tall tower was built for the Century 21 Exposition, the 1962 World's Fair. But after the start of the construction work had been delayed due to an unsettled question of financing. Later it was completed after only one year. Impossible nowadays, not only because the tower was the first one with a revolving restaurant in North America. In the following decades, it served as a model for numerous television and observation towers worldwide.

Seattle, home of Hendrix and Nirvana, has a pop-museum too.

Space Needle is distinctive, but it it’s not number one in this town. Only the city's eighth-highest building dominates its skyline and has become Seattle's landmark, but the other skyscrapers give the view from above the feeling of a wallpaper: All around are concrete and window fronts from glass.

Long ago at the time of its completion, the Space Needle was the highest building in the city and the second one min the United States west of the Mississippi after the pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge. This great times are gone, but the futuristic style of the Space Needle, now a offivial historic landmark, still looks like a building from the future.

As a tourist destination, it is visited by over one million people every year and when you come to Seattle one day you shoulnd’t miss this giant thing.